My Story

¡Hola! I'm Fernanda. When I was only two years old, my mother and I chased the American Dream all the way from Santiago, Chile. She came to the United States in pursuit of a better life, leaving behind everything and everyone we knew.

Despite being raised here in the US, my heart always remained close to my roots. My mother kept our language and Chilean traditions alive, we maintained in constant contact with my family in Santiago, and we traveled home as often as finances would allow. Our nostalgia and love for home even led to a brief move back to Chile during my middle school years. 

My life between two cultures led me to have a broad worldview at a young age- one that many people never get the chance to develop.

I wanted to share my love for my language and culture with other people. This motivated me to become a foreign language teacher and instill open-mindedness and curiosity in new generations. However, if I wanted my students to be excited about learning, I had to set the standard and passionately teach.

I've always taken pride in being diligent and detail-oriented, but growing up, I wasn't confident I could define myself as 'creative.' My time as an educator has proved to me that ingenuity comes in many forms. I love experimenting with technology to create visually appealing, fun, and effective educational materials that genuinely resonate with my students and motivate them to learn.

After only a year as a foreign language educator, I was offered the opportunity to teach Spanish as a Heritage Language. This course is a language arts class entirely in Spanish and is made for students who I deeply identify with. Heritage speakers of Spanish, like me, learned the language at home but grew up in an English-speaking society. 

I've found immense joy in improving my school's Spanish for Heritage Speakers curriculum. It's been a genuine pleasure to watch these students become confident readers, writers, and speakers of their language and grow in their identity as Latinos.

I invite you to look at some of the resources I have poured my heart into creating.